Related

Would a vegetarian diet elevate my serum uric acid?
Eating vegetarian should be safe for your gout. While many vegetables including those that you mention do contain purines a recent research article in the New England Journal of Medicine indicates that the vegetables that contain purines are less likely to provoke gout.

What are vegetarian protein sources other than tofu and beans?
There are so many great choices for getting protein. Some are more complete than others, meaning that they contain all of the essential amino acids. One reason soy products are so desirable is that they offer a complete protein, but so does buckwheat and quinoa.

Health & Nutrition Bites

Get the latest health and diet news - along with what you can do about
it - sent to your Inbox once a week. Get Dr. Gourmet's Health and Nutrition
Bites sent to you via email. Sign up now!

Are Vegetarians Less Likely to be Overweight?

After following my columns on Nutrition
and Weight Loss Myths for the last four weeks, one of my patients
asked about being vegetarian. They questioned if there was really scientific
evidence of better health among those who don't eat meat.

The answer is yes. One excellent example was published last year in the American
Journal of Clinical Nutrition (2005;81:1267-1274).
Information about diet that had been collected in Sweden as part
of a large mammogram study was evaluated. The participants had
answered questionnaires about their diet and asked to classify whether
they were omnivores (consumed all food), semivegetarians (eating some
animal protein), lactovegetarians (consuming dairy and/or eggs) or vegan
(strictly vegetarian).

There were a small percentage of the women studied that considered themselves
to be in one of the vegetarian categories (2% of the over 54,000 women
analyzed). The data showed a significantly lower Body
Mass Index (BMI) in these groups.

The difficulty with studies such as this one is that simply identifying
that the vegetarians have a lower BMI doesn't show that eating that way
is the cause. The researchers do acknowledge this. The best research will
come when large studies are done that compare people over the long term
while they eat a vegetarian diet or one that contains meat.

What this means for you

There is a lot of research showing that
eating less meat or eating vegetarian can be very good for you, but
we don't yet know exactly how. Vegetarian recipes are not automatically
healthier, however, as they can be just as full of fat, salt, and cholesterol
as any other food. Reviewing the nutrition facts carefully is key.